Fred Brunel - Latest Comments in Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

casa — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:24:40 -0000

I found an interesting article on Ruby on Leopard at this address

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/ruby/wiki/W....
And here is the adress of the blog of the guy that was responsible for Python and Ruby integration at Apple : http://chopine.be/lrz/diary/.</p>

To sumarize : bridges are now shipped with the OS.

Enjoy!

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

fbrunel — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:26:25 -0000

Hi Michel,

Interesting. If Apple truly support these bridges within their tools that's a very good news.

Actually, the Java bridge failed and they didn't support it anymore. I've been told it was because Java is "less dynamic" than Obj-C and that lead to troubles.

On the opposite, Python and Ruby are "more dynamic" than Obj-C, so they would be a better fit.

OS X rules, I agree :)

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

casa — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:16:27 -0000

Have a look at http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html, especially "Scripting Bridge" part.

MacOSX rules

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

casa — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:49:09 -0000

Bit Torrent on MacOSX was written in Python using Obj-C binding. I think this was a great app (and still using it on my Intel box, even if it is a PPC binary). It is probably possible to write good software with Ruby too with a bridge.

I think this is a matter of habits.

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

fbrunel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:27:28 -0000

@heri complete online software is an holy grail and I'm still a big fan of desktop software -- especially for the Mac -- the experience is totally different from the web.

Actually, I don't think both compete, an hybrid combination would make a perfect sense, i.e. iTunes Store.

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

fbrunel — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:22:27 -0000

@david Thanks for your comment. Despite my negative feedback, I also think that Cocoa is a great framework given its low-level nature.

I gave a try to CoreData two years ago and it was not that bad -- the lack of programming abstraction is compensated by the tools.

The command-line program was just for the matter of example, I would not used Cocoa to do that kind of job.

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

heri — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:20:35 -0000

even adobe is thinking about bringing photoshop to the web. when we will be there, there is no point to create desktop software.

Re: Why Desktop Programming Is So Unproductive?

David Caplan — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 14:09:31 -0000

It really isn't as bad as you think. I agree with you that writing apps should be "easier", but then again Objective C is basically C and C is basically hard :)

The thing with Cocoa (and especially with Core Data) is that it really isn't that "hard" to make a beautifully looking and fully functional application. I would suggest to you to check out some Core Data tutorials on Apple's site and others... I just started using Obj-c/Cocoa/Core Data a month ago and it took a couple of days for me to prototype my app's interface and have full undo/redo as well as open/save functionality... without having to write more than a few (maybe 20-30) lines of code.

I agree that some things should be easier in Obj-C, especially for data analysis, parsing, etc... but I think the whole app design framework was made to be able to design the interface easily and have full control over the back-end code.

I guess if you are only talking about pure command line apps then I can understand your complaints... but then again, just use perl/ruby/python for that stuff.